Author and journalist Anita Bhagwandas has occupied some of the most senior beauty journalism roles in magazines and newspapers over her nearly twenty-year career. She entered the beauty industry feeling like an outsider, determined to take the white-centric, thinner-is-better ideal perpetuated in media and open it up into something much more inclusive.

Because it sucks to be an outsider. And it sucks even harder to be an outsider for things that you simply cannot do anything about, such as your skin colour.

Though Anita entered the world of beauty journalism in order to be an agent for change, she perhaps underestimated the impact the fashion and beauty world would have on her, a girl from Wales who had never felt as though she fit in or looked the right way. In many ways, she was throwing herself headlong into a world ripe to reject, dismiss and other her and, as I’m sure we’ll discuss, that was a part of her career journey she perhaps hadn’t anticipated.

Her book Ugly deep dives into why we find what we find beautiful, beautiful but perhaps, more than that, it uncovers why we assign ugly to so much, including, more often than not ourselves.

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